Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Yes, I am one of them. And I can't help laughing every time that my four-year-old son says that he "bomb-ed it" when he means that he "vomited". Maybe it's just that it's so rare now that he gets something wrong - gone are the days when he pronounced "sandwich" as "flatherch", said apples as "appoos", and called our dog Good Girl, because he thought that was her name. He used to say that the moon must love him, because it followed him wherever we went. Once he told me that the crescent moon must be really hungry, because it was so thin now. It was months later that I made the connection: a full moon and a hungry moon.

Now, he knows the truth about so many things that I wish he didn't. He tells me things that make me angry and break my heart and make me despair that I am an inadequate parent. He asks for toys and video games and candy and ice cream and soda and all of those things that I have to remember I longed for, too. He refuses to wear the expensive clothes and shoes that I buy him, things that my own parents could never afford, claiming that they're too tight or too loose, too long or too short. He tells me that he wishes I would leave our family, then cries when I go into the bathroom and he thinks I've gone. He tells me that he is a frog, then a baby cow, then a king, then a dinosaur, and when I find him asleep in his bed, he has wrapped one of my sweaters around himself, the arms of it encircling his tiny body like a phantom hug.